Revolutionary Perspectives

Unit Overview

Many developments in the colonies during the decades prior to 1776
contributed to the colonists’ increasing desire to alter relations with Great
Britain. The colonies’ population had increased tenfold since 1700; and
their economies, particularly in the North, had become more oriented
around trade, cities, and even manufacturing.

New ways of thinking accompanied these economic changes. Young men
more commonly left home to seek their fortunes away from their fathers’
authority, and young men and women alike more often married whom and
when they pleased. More and more churchgoers asserted that people
could choose salvation, that God alone did not decide who would be
saved and who would be damned. Their liberal counterparts spoke more
and more optimistically about people’s capacity to invent a better stove
or a better society without God’s direct intervention, and that humans
were making all aspects of life better and better. This optimism in people’s
capacity to shape the world fuelled a growing belief that citizens—not just
kings and queens—could exercise political sovereignty.

The American Revolution constituted a sort of marriage between these
material and ideological changes. Economic and social developments
fitted the colonies for independence. But declaring and seizing that
independence required both a series of provocative political events and
an underlying sense of political rights that borrowed from the European
Enlightenment. This broad intellectual and cultural movement stressed
humans’ capacity to manage their own affairs reasonably and effectively.

The American Revolution, in fact, generated radical political ideas and
changes, often in ways that alarmed conservative patriots. Most Native
Americans and many slaves sided with the British for practical reasons.
But many African Americans, women, and poor whites in the countryside
and cities alike seized upon and expanded the rhetoric of freedom, liberty,
and rights. The hotly contested debates around state constitutions—and
the final drafts of those constitutions—illustrated the wide differences of
opinion on just how far the revolution in political authority should go.

Historians still disagree on how radical the Revolution was—to what extent
it established political and social equality. But there is no doubt that it
both broke decisively with Great Britain’s political practices, and prompted
hopes and ideals that Americans and others still strive to achieve.